Jon Pardi’s “Last Night Lonely” Officially Earns #1 At Country Radio

Jon Pardi’s “Last Night Lonely” completes its ascent to #1 on this week’s Mediabase country radio singles chart.

Up one place from last week’s position, “Last Night Lonely” seizes the throne from Chris Young & Mitchell Tenpenny’s “At The End Of A Bar.”

In addition to ruling for chart points, “Last Night Lonely” ranks as the Mediabase country panel’s most played and heard song for the August 21-27 tracking period.

With “Last Night Lonely,” Pardi submits the first single from his next album, a swaggering country mid-tempo track about a guy once again buying a drink for a woman at a bar, essentially suggesting that this could be the first day of the rest of their lives… together.

The fiddle was not envisioned by the three “Last Night Lonely” songwriters: Dylan Marlowe, Joe Fox and Jimi Bell. But they did anticipate an electric baritone guitar, a sort of “Wichita Lineman” sound bouncing like a pinball in their original intro. But it never quite made it into Pardi’s version.

“It was definitely worth the wait,” says Marlowe, “but it’s funny, because Jon Pardi actually doesn’t have that baritone.”

“We went through tons of ideas, and we didn’t get it the first day,” Marlowe says. “The next week, we wrote again to the same riff and still didn’t get it. And then the third day, it finally clicked.”

The breakthrough came with “Last Night Lonely,” a title that seemed to match the flavor of that bouncing riff. They actually started that chorus on the second writing session and got most, maybe even all, of it before they decided to let it lie.

“Last Night Lonely” was a fairly easy choice for the first single from Pardi’s next album. Capitol Nashville released the track to country radio via PlayMPE on Feb. 17.